Ikea.com
Ikea has a nice enough website at first glance. Its online catalog seems like it would be comparable with other online stores. It is nice and clean, and has lots of pictures. All the important details are easy to find (price, size, etc). And it looks like they’ve got pretty good integration with their brink and mortar inventory levels. Cool!
Checkout works pretty well .. sorta. You can go through the purchase process without an account. The checkout process is pretty typical of online stores and went well.. until you get to the point where you expect your receipt. Instead you get a little paragraph telling you that your order has been sent to .. somewhere (sales?).. and you will be contacted about your order.
Apparently Ikea’s website is a glorified frontend to their catalogue sales and orders you submit get fed into similar human manage queue. WTH?
The next day I got an email letting me know about shipping and taxes and telling me shipping would take 3 weeks. Err.. that is so 1990. Whatever. I responded to the email confirming that I accept the charges. After which it took 3 days for me to get the next email that said my order had been processed.
Great website, but poor checkout experience. Total lack of “instant gratification”. And ending on a sour note isn’t the way to go. What would it have taken to integrate the shopping cart with their existing catalog purchasing system and payment gateway?